After creating the hugely successful Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales officially lauches an open source, transparent search engine called Wikia Search:
To Wales, this algorithmic transparency is key to what Wikia Search wants to do. Other search engines keep their algorithms hidden in an attempt to keep site operators from gaming the system and competitors from seeing how it works. But Wales believes that it's important to know how the algorithm works, since each algorithm makes an editorial statement.
This isn't the way that most people think about algorithms, which seem like the ultimate expressions of unbiased machine processing. Wales turns to an example to make his point: searching for "Thomas Jefferson" might return a page of ten links. Those links ostensibly represent the most important information about him, but are they? Who says so? The way the algorithm was tuned and constructed means that even these results are "an editorial statement" about the sorts of pages that are important. Algorithms of this kind aren't neutral any more than the people who create them are.
While it's fine to run a search engine this way, Wales thinks that users want more; they want real transparency about the way that the engine produces results, and they want a hand in tuning these results.
Links: Article at Ars Technica | Wikia Search homepage, search page
Comments (1)
1) Comparing today's Office to the old DOS Word isn't exactly fair. You can however to the custom install of office and tell it not to install Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, etc. And then you can tell it not to install many features within Word itself. Even then, even ignoring the many features that'll still be installed that weren't in the original Word, what you'll get will be far easier to learn and use than the original Word.
2) In the days of 10MB hard drives, my drive was filled with about 95% program code and about 5% data. Now in the days of 1TB hard drives with music and video and digital photography, my drive is filled with about 5% program code and about 95% data.
Even Steve Gibson doesn't hand compile app's for Win7.
Add in complicated IDE's that do way more then just "help you program" and my Toolkit is bigger then your Toolkit subroutines and massively fat applications is what you get.
Nobody even tries to program lean anymore. If it's too slow - instead of tightening up the code - they just throw bigger hardware at it.
Just check the minimum spec's on any modern game for proof.
Another one of those ''ain't Americans stupid'' myths spread by yet another european.
Sigh.